


sometimes wish she'd never been born at all

by dearmaggiemay



Series: queen+cordelia [2]
Category: Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018)
Genre: 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Angst, Character Death, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Prequel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-16 08:54:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18688219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dearmaggiemay/pseuds/dearmaggiemay
Summary: Blood is thicker than water, but water runs deeper. She was raised by her sister but also the shipyard, so in the end, it made sense leaving Boston by sea.Or, sometimes fathers don't know how to act as such. It spirals down from there.





	sometimes wish she'd never been born at all

**Author's Note:**

> This is just my own little prequel about Delia's childhood and teenage years in Boston, and some other things that happened while she was in London. Each chapter corresponds to a decade, so the whole fic will go from the 50s to the 80s. And, honestly, if nobody gets the hint about Delia and how she _actually_ fits into the BoRhap universe I will feel a little bit disappointed. Anyway, enjoy!

1970

“You are drunk, Anna!” one of her cast mates exclaimed. Delia gave him middle finger.

“Fuck off, Johnny, I told you it’s Delia now!”

“Delia?” Roger asked. Still half-wrapped around Freddie, Delia just shrugged.

“I will be an actress,” she confidently said. No ‘I want to’, no ‘I hope to’... She would be an actress. “Like, a real one, not this shitty thing we do here. Anna is boring and common, Cordelia stands out.”

“Didn’t you just play that character? King Lear’s daughter?” Freddie arched an eyebrow. Delia smiled and nodded _and lied, because the lie was way less painful than the truth._

 

-x-

 

1950

Rose Dobbs named her youngest and most unexpected daughter Cordelia.

(Thank God it was another girl, because the alternative would have been Horatio, and Rose didn’t know how she would have made her husband agree with that name).

The baby had come earlier than expected and was therefore a bit too small against Rose’s sweaty chest, but she looked healthy and pink and had her ten little fingers and toes, and the exhausted mother cried in relief when she saw the fiery red hair and the blue eyes. Most babies had blue eyes at birth and the colour would change later, Rose knew that, having seen it in her older daughters. Martha and Lucy had their father’s greyish eyes but Cordelia would have her mother’s eyes, she knew it, and maybe it meant something. Maybe it meant nothing.

Maybe it just meant that she was starting to suffer the effects of the blood loss and her mind was getting slower and foggier with every passing second. Rose barely had a second to hold her baby tighter, to think of her older daughters that were outside, waiting with their father. She was vaguely aware of the doctor calling for more nurses, another doctor entering the room, her little Cordelia crying for the first time…

At thirty-five years old, Rose Dobbs was dead before anybody had had the opportunity to cut the umbilical cord that still connected her body to her daughter’s.

 

-x-

 

Andrew Dobbs, grief-stricken, named his youngest daughter Anna. Changing the name on the birth certificate felt like burying Rose for a second time.

After the funeral, he took his three daughters to his father’s house for the week that took him to erase any trace of his late wife from their house. Clothes were donated to charity, paintings and pictures and painting materials were given to the local school, every single photograph was carefully put in a box that went straight to the attic and hundreds of books were donated to the public library. The only books that survived the purge were old encyclopedias, atlas and the like. No Shakespeare, no Oscar Wilde, no Dickens, no Edgar Allan Poe. Nothing that could make him think of Rose's acting aspirations, nothing that could remind him of his lovely wife and pull him deeper into his grief. He had three daughters to take care of, and he was alone.

Well, not yet, but he would be. His father was old and frail and his intern nurse was worrier every time Andrew visited his father. He knew it was a matter of time. As for the other side of the family, Rose's only brother had come all the way from London for the funeral and left shortly after, hurried and encouraged by Andrew himself. He didn’t particularly care for his brother-in-law’s… Proclivities, but people talked, and the vice president of one of Boston’s most important shipyards didn’t need that kind of rumours spilling everywhere.

(He caved in, but Andrew hadn’t wanted Rose’s brother to hold Anna. Andrew wasn’t a bigot, _he was grieving,_  and even though his brother-in-law didn’t look like Rose at all, the sight of Jonathan holding the baby felt like a blow to the chest.)

Martha and Lucy didn’t stop crying for what felt entire weeks. They would often start sobbing at the same time, even if they were in separate rooms. They were the perfect stereotype of twins in that particular sense. The baby didn’t stop crying for months, as if she could feel that her existence had condemned her mother. It was the ugliest of thoughts and Andrew hated himself for it, but he couldn’t help it. They hadn’t wanted another baby. Anna had been a surprise. A lovely surprise, in the beginning, but… If it wasn’t for that surprise, Rose would be still alive.

Anna was already crawling on the carpets by the time Andrew was able to force himself to hold his daughter. And even then, he was ashamed to admit that he didn’t feel like a father. He felt empty, lost, holding a little piece of Rose that looked just like her to make everything harder. They were completely clueless around each other, but at least Anna had the excuse of being a baby. On the other hand, Andrew was just a widower unable to put his life back together.

In a sick way, it had to be hilarious.  A grown man utterly unable to face his baby, a daughter looking up at her father in confusion and probably wondering who he was. Andrew couldn’t blame her, really, because the one who took care of the baby was his father’s nurse. And when it wasn’t the nurse, it was Lucy.

Lucy, far more mature than her ten years would suggest, got used to sitting on the couch and balancing little Anna on her legs, bouncing them until the baby would laugh and make cute noises, her little hands desperately trying to grab her sister’s hair. Those were the only moments in which Lucy would smile and Andrew got used to quietly spying his own daughter from the door. If she ever noticed, she never said anything.

Andrew never said anything either. He just watched, like an outsider, his two daughters playing on the couch. The sun entered the room from a window and warmed their house at the same time that it seemed to ignite the girls’ red hair on fire, and Andrew had to go inside and close the curtains because their hair reminded him too much of Rose. Lucy, bless her, never said anything.

Martha, unlike her twin, never sat with Anna on her legs, never tickled her and tried to make her smile. She would usually join Andrew on the door, leaning against him and eyeing the baby with mistrust and pain and anger in her young eyes. It was wrong. It was completely wrong to allow those feelings to grow but Andrew didn’t know how to stop them, because those were the same feelings he saw in his eyes every morning in the mirror. He couldn't force Martha to love her sister just as he wasn't able to force himself to... Love her? Did he even love that baby? The question haunted him at night. He could barely stand being in the same room, how could he claim to love little innocent Anna? Maybe he did. Maybe he did love his daughter and he was still numb to the world and that's why he didn't feel anything.

Or maybe he would eventually learn to love her. In spite of her mother or _because of her mother_ , Andrew wasn't sure of which option was the worst. So he didn’t stop those feelings from growing roots into his daughter, and quietly begged Rose for forgiveness instead. Deep down he knew that without his wife, their family would implode from the inside and he wouldn’t be able to do anything but watch.

 

-x-

 

1955

Grandpa Dobbs died in October, almost in November, just a few days before the anniversary of her mother’s death, and Martha had to pretend like she hadn’t just seen her father breaking down in the middle of the kitchen after coming back from the funeral.

The fifteen year-old girl turn around and left as quietly as possible, going upstairs. She tried not to look at the walls, as the empty spaces where Rose's paintings had once been hung were still visible. Her mother’s presence, or rather the lack of it, even after five years, could get suffocating. After burying her grandfather, Martha just couldn’t handle it so she walked faster.

When she walked past the first room, the girl saw that Anna’s door was partly opened. Martha stopped in front of the room and watched her little sister all curled up in the bed, half asleep, her eyes puffy and red from crying. Martha pulled a face. Anna hadn’t even really known grandpa; she was too young and the man had been mostly unresponding for the three last years of his life, so there was no way that Anna could really feel any loss.

Although she hadn’t known their mother either, and it didn’t stop the little girl from asking for pictures and stories about Rose. It made Martha physically sick. Couldn’t that brat see that every single one of her unnecessary questions was hurting their father? The anger made Martha close the door a bit harsher than she had expected.

When she went into her own room, Martha raised an eyebrow at the display of colourful papers that were in disarray all over her floor. Her sister was sitting on the bed, still wearing her clothes from the funeral and carefully crafting flowers and little animals out of the papers.

“What are you doing?”

Lucy shrugged a bit. Her eyes were as red as Anna’s and didn’t move from the pink paper she was folding into a little butterfly. “Some decorations. For Anna’s birthday. I thought it would be… Nice, to have a distraction, you know? Do you want to help me?”

Those words from her own sister’s mouth felt like a slap, and Martha breathed in and out slowly to stop herself from saying something she would regret later. “Do you think this is the right time? Grandpa has just passed.”

“I’ve told you already, I needed some distraction. Besides, if we don’t start now, the decorations won’t be ready in time for the birthday.”

“Like I care for birthdays right now. _Fuck_ her birthday. It isn’t like anybody will be in the mood for celebrating anything, you know it.”

Lucy gave her a careful look before focusing again on her task. “Anna will want to celebrate her birthday, like any other kid. You aren’t being fair.”

“Life isn’t fair, Lucy, grow up,” Martha hissed, trying to keep her voice low. “Dad is having a really rough time and the only thing you think about are some paper flowers for a birthday party that nobody wants to celebrate, what’s your problem?”

“And what’s yours?” Lucy asked, leaving paper and scissors on the bed and standing up with a murderous expression on her face. “I can’t believe _you_ are telling me to grow up. It wasn’t her fault that mom died. It wasn’t even her fault that she was born at all! You have always blamed her for it but let me tell you, hating a toddler for her mother’s death is a pretty sick thing to do. You should feel ashamed of yourself.”

“Get out. Now.”

Lucy started to cry again while she picked up all the papers, but she left the room holding her head up and carefully avoiding looking at Martha. The girl closed the door as soon as her twin was out of the room but it didn’t solve anything. It didn’t prevent her from hearing Lucy’s furious pathing from the room on her left, Anna’s sobs coming from the room on her right, something breaking downstairs in the kitchen. Sitting on her bed, Martha held her pillow tight against her face and screamed until she lost her voice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Family cheat sheet:  
> -Andrew (1910- ) Father. Vice president of a shipyard.  
> -Rose (1915-1950) Mother. Housewife, painter, wanted to be an actress.  
> -Jonathan (1935- ) Rose's younger brother. Lives in London.  
> -Martha & Lucy (1940- ) Twins.  
> -Anna aka Delia (1950- ) The younger sister.


End file.
